1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to document sharing and collaboration, and more particularly, to optimizing the rendering of shared documents on client devices with document raster representations.
2. Related Art
The core of modern business is information, with its creation, distribution, and management being primary functions. Information or content can be presented in a variety of different ways, including word processing documents, spreadsheets, graphics, photographs, engineering drawings, architectural plans, and so forth. In electronic form, these are all generally referred to as documents, and may be generated by software applications that are specific thereto. A typical workflow in the enterprise involves various personnel collaborating to create, review, and/or edit such documents, and because of advancements in high-speed data communications and computing capabilities, these processes can involve remote personnel.
Due to the existence of many different computing platforms having a wide variety of operating systems, application programs, and processing and graphic display capabilities, it was recognized by those in the art that a device-independent, resolution-independent file format was necessary to facilitate such exchange. In response to this need, the Portable Document Format (PDF), amongst other competing formats, has been developed.
The PDF standard is a combination of a number of technologies, including a simplified PostScript interpreter subsystem, a font embedding subsystem, and a storage subsystem. As those in the art will recognize, PostScript is a page description language for generating the layout and the graphics of a document. Further, per the requirements of the PDF storage subsystem, all elements of the document, including text, vector graphics, and raster (bitmap) graphics, collectively referred to herein as graphic elements, are encapsulated into a single file. The graphic elements are not encoded to a specific operating system, software application, or hardware, but are designed to be rendered in the same manner regardless of the specificities relating to the system writing or reading such data. The cross-platform capability of PDF aided in its widespread adoption, and is now a de facto document exchange standard. Although originally proprietary, PDF has been released as an open standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 3200-1:2008. Currently, PDF is utilized to encode a wide variety of document types, including those composed largely of text, and those composed largely of vector and raster graphics. Due to its versatility and universality, files in the PDF format are often preferred over more particularized file formats of specific applications. As such, documents are frequently converted to the PDF format.
From the user interface perspective, PDF documents are typically rendered statically, in which individual elements thereof such as text, pictures, and other elements are not editable. However, one of several improvements that have been made since the initial releases of PDF readers, writers, and the standard itself, is the support for adding annotations to a base document. Such annotations are graphically overlaid or “placed” on the underlying document, with placement being precisely controlled by the user. Thus, the functionality is similar to graphic illustration/design and image manipulation applications where various objects can be positioned on a document canvas by navigating a cursor to a desired location and providing a subsequent input to make placement permanent. Before positioning the cursor, the object to be placed, such as a geometric primitive, a text box, or the like, is selected.
Conventional implementations of the annotation feature are used to facilitate a linear workflow, where one user creates an initial version of a document, and distributes/e-mails the same to colleagues for review, comments, and amendments. Thereafter, upon receiving comments and amendments, the primary author incorporates them in to the document, and distributes it again in a second revision cycle. Not much more than a basic e-mail and computing infrastructure is required. Improvements to this iterative revision cycle have been developed to overcome challenges associated with additional participants, change in workflow hierarchy to many-to-many where participants carry on several concurrent revision dialogs, and so on. In particular, there are collaboration platforms where multiple users in scattered locations can edit documents in real-time, with a single authoritative version being maintained by a central server or cloud-based storage. Various PDF-specific collaboration platforms are also known in the art, including Bluebeam Studio.
Along with the increase in the number of participants in collaboration sessions comes the increase in the diversity of computing devices utilized by such participants. Numerous competing devices are available in different product categories, the selection of which is generally governed by the mobility requirements of the particular user. For example, the most mobile, yet smallest footprint (and hence smallest display and input device real estate) device is the smart phone. Slightly larger but with increased processing power are smart phone operating system-based tablets such as the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy, and so on. Still larger and approaching the performance levels of conventional desktop and mobile (laptop) computers are intermediate devices such as Microsoft Surface Pro which run conventional desktop operating systems. Although there may be some performance compromises, all but the most demanding tasks can be completed with either desktop or mobile/laptop computers. In a collaborative environment, each of the participants may have different computing needs that can be fulfilled with one device or the other. Furthermore, with a mobile and ever-available workforce, the particular device a given participant may be utilizing often depends on time and location.
Rendering PDF documents in desktop or mobile/laptop computers, and even intermediate tablet-computer devices, is usually a trivial matter. PDF documents are comprised of text streams and vector and/or raster graphics data arranged as described in the PostScript page description language. The data in the PDF file must be interpreted for rendering, so some degree of processing is required. This processing can be completed with a minimal burden computing resources on conventional desktop computer systems and other devices of similar capability. However, the time required to perform the same tasks on less powerful devices such as tablets can be significantly delayed, leaving some regions of the document blank for extended periods of time as the limited processor attempts to render those portions.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for optimizing the rendering of documents, particularly shared ones, over multiple client devices. There is also a need for improving the presentation of documents on tablets and other devices with comparatively lower processing capabilities such that delays are minimized.